Humans & Dogs: Cooperation / Co-Evolution / Domestication

Give a dog a bad name...

Dogs are regarded as more tolerant and less aggressive compared to their ancestors, the wolves. Researchers from the Messerli Research Institute at the Vetmeduni Vienna question this image. They show in a recent study that wolves interact with conspecifics in an even more tolerant way than dogs, suggesting that dogs have a steeper dominance hierarchy than wolves. The results will be published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The good relationship between humans and dogs was certainly influenced by domestication. For long, it was assumed that humans preferred particularly tolerant animals for breeding. Thus, cooperative and less aggressive dogs could develop. Recently, however, it was suggested that these qualities were not only specific for human-dog interactions, but characterize also dog-dog interactions. Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute investigated in their study if dogs are in fact less aggressive and more tolerant towards their conspecifics than wolves.

They carried out several behavioural tests on dogs and wolves. The animals were hand-raised in the Wolf Science Center in Ernstbrunn, Lower Austria, and kept in separated packs of wolves and dogs. Range and her colleagues tested nine wolves and eight mongrel dogs. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-myth-tolerant-dogs-aggressive-wolves.html
 
A prehistoric dog is about to go to the dentist. Ardern Hulme-Beaman, a lanky 27-year-old Irish postdoc, pulls on a white facemask and lifts a small 5000-year-old jawbone from a cardboard box. He places a gloved hand over one of the molars and gently tugs from side to side until it pops out. The jagged top of the tooth is yellowish white, but the roots are dirty brown. Hulme-Beaman powers on a drill, and a circular blade screeches into a root. The scent of burning hair fills the air. “That's a good sign,” he says. “It means there's DNA here.”

Hulme-Beaman has spent the past 6 months traveling the world in search of ancient dog bones like this one. He's found plenty in this Ohio State University archaeology laboratory. Amid boxes stacked high with Native American artifacts, rows of plastic containers filled with primate teeth, and a hodgepodge of microscopes, calipers, and research papers, a few shoe and cigar boxes hold the jigsaw pieces of a dozen canines: skulls, femurs, mandibles, and vertebrae. ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/feature-solving-mystery-dog-domestication

 
Dogs became man’s best friends somewhere in central Asia close to Nepal and Mongolia, according to the largest genetic study yet. The work looked at DNA from thousands of living dogs to piece together their ancestry and geographical origins.

“This is the first global study of genomic patterns of dog diversity,” says Adam Boyko of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the team. “We find a clear pattern of genetic diversity focused on central Asia, suggesting the first domesticated dogs came from this region.”

That departs from earlier studies that pinpointed Europe as where dogs were domesticated, although more recent work puts the location in southern China, just 1000 kilometres from the area Boyko’s team proposes.

The team broke new ground by analysing DNA samples from so-called “village dogs”, which have lived alongside humans throughout the world since dogs first evolved from wolves and were domesticated around 15,000 years ago. “Although they associate with humans, village dogs are more or less expected to make it on their own,” says Boyko.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...t&cmpid=SOC%25257CNSNS%25257C2015-GLOBAL-hoot
 
Anyone who owns a dog is familiar with the "gaze"—that hypnotic, imploring stare that demands reciprocation. It can seem to hold a world of mystery and longing, or just pure bafflement at what makes humans tick.

It turns out that the look of mutual recognition between human and dog reflects thousands of years of evolution, a bond programmed into our very body chemistry. Last spring a research team in Japan discovered that both species release a hormone called oxytocin when they look into each other's eyes—the same hormone released when a human mother beholds her baby.

What's more, the Japanese study showed that higher levels of oxytocin were released during that gaze than during petting or talking. It seems that for dogs, at least where humans are concerned, eyes really are windows to the soul.

"It's a very compelling study, that even on a chemical basis we get this kind of biological impulse to bond, and animals have the same impulse to bond with us," says University of Alberta anthropologist Robert Losey, who studies the historical relationship between dogs and humans.

But where does that unique symbiosis begin, one that has long involved even the sharing of parasites and certain diseases? According to Losey, the biochemical bonding impulse is only one part of the story. His own research is focused on teasing out the cultural forces over time that have made dogs and humans such a good fit.

Best friends forever?

One of Losey's projects involves the excavation of dog remains between 5,000 and 8,000 years old at Lake Baikal, Siberia, the deepest freshwater lake in the world. What's striking about the find is it reveals dogs were buried alongside humans in cemeteries, pointing not only to some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication but also suggesting dogs were held in the same high esteem as humans.

"The dogs were being treated just like people when they died," says Losey. "They were being carefully placed in a grave, some of them wearing decorative collars, or next to other items like spoons, with the idea being potentially that they had souls and an afterlife." In one instance a man was found buried in the same grave as his two dogs, one on either side. ...

http://phys.org/news/2016-03-explores-prehistoric-relationship-humans-dogs.html
 
Usually, when I look at a dog's eyes, that seems to be a signal to the dog to spring forth, teeth bared.
I tend not to look a dog in the eye these days.
 
A dog bone found at an Irish Stone Age tomb has helped to shed new light on the possible dual origins of pet dogs.

The dog bone, believed to date back almost 5,000 years, was unearthed at Newgrange in County Meath - an ancient monument built by Stone Age farmers.

Scientists at Trinity College Dublin used it to sequence the dog's genome.

The research suggests that modern dogs may have emerged from two separate domestications of wolves, on opposite ends of the Eurasian continent.

It challenges previous theories that man's best friend originated from a single domestication of wolves in Asia.

The DNA analysis conducted in Dublin formed part of a major international study of dog domestication, led by Oxford University in the UK.

The Newgrange dog's genetic blueprint was compared to that of 59 ancient dogs, some dating from as far back as 14,000 years.

It was also contrasted to the DNA of 2,500 modern dogs. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36450258
 
Ancient Dog Graveyard Found at Siberia’s Lake Baikal

While dogs have been following humans for about 40,000 years, the practice of respectfully burying them after death is relatively recent. A new study suggests it may have developed 8,000 years ago at the mysterious Lake Baikal in Siberia where an unusual canine graveyard was recently discovered.

Lake Baikal in south-east Siberia is Earth’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake and has long been the location of UFO sightings and alien encounters, with recent rumors persisting that Steven Spielberg may produce a UFO documentary there. It also has a long history of humans domesticating dogs.

skull-1-570x363.jpg

Dog skull buried at Lake Baikal in Siberia

University of Alberta anthropologist Robert Losey studies the history of human and dog relationships and recently visited Lake Baikal where he led the excavation of dog remains dating back 5,000 to 8,000 years. The manner in which they were buried was unusual, says Losey. ...

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/07/ancient-dog-graveyard-found-at-siberias-lake-baikal/
 
How farming changed the dog
By Elizabeth PennisiNov. 8, 2016 , 7:15 PM

Farming didn’t just revolutionize human society—it transformed the genome of our oldest friend, the dog. A new study reveals that by 7000 years ago, our canine companions were eating so much wheat and millet they made extra copies of starch-digesting genes to help them cope. And this adaptation is what allowed them to stay by our sides, even as our world changed.

The genetic evolution in dogs parallels what others have found in humans, says Peter Savolainen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, who was not involved with the work. "With farming we started to eat starch, and both we and dogs had to adapt to this change."

Some of the first insights into how farming changed the canine genome came 3 years ago. That’s when evolutionary geneticist Erik Axelsson of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues discovered that dogs have four to 30 copies of a gene—Amy2B—that helps digest starch, whereas wolves typically only have two. Morgane Ollivier wanted to know just when that genetic change happened. A paleogeneticist at Ecole Normale Supéieure de Lyon in France, she teamed up with Axelsson and others, who extracted ancient DNA from the bones and teeth of 13 wolf and dog specimens collected from archaeological sites throughout Eurasia. Four of the ancient dogs—from a 7000-year-old site in Romania and 5000-year-old sites in Turkmenistan and France—had more than eight copies of Amy2B, Ollivier and her colleagues report today in Royal Society Open Science. They do not yet know how many copies ancient wolves had. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/how-farming-changed-dog
 
Wolves are more logical and philosophical than dogs.

Domestic dogs may have lost some of their innate animal skill when they came in from the wild, according to new research conducted at the Wolf Science Center in Austria.

In a study comparing wolves and dogs living in near-identical environments, wolves were better at working some things out, particularly at grasping the notion of cause and effect.

The research, by an international team in Austria, the Netherlands, Germany and England, is published in Scientific Reports.

Recently graduated lead author Michelle Lampe, of the Radboud University, in the Netherlands, said: "Children learn the principle of cause and effect early on, that if you touch a hot stove you will get burned, for example. Our study has shown the wolf also understands such connections, but our four-legged domesticated companions don't.

"It seems wolves are better at working some things out than dogs, which suggests domestication has changed dogs' cognitive abilities.

"It can't be ruled out that the differences could be due to wolves being more persistent in exploring than dogs. Dogs are conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to find food themselves in nature."

Michelle Lampe, Dr Zsófia Virányi, of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Dr Juliane Bräuer, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, and Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University of Portsmouth, UK, investigated the reasoning abilities of 14 dogs and 12 human-socialised wolves.

The tests included the animals having to choose between two objects, one containing hidden food and the other empty to see whether the animals could make use of communicative cues, such as direct eye-contact and pointing gestures to choose the correct container. ...

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-wolves-effect-dogs.html
 
Mythopoeika said:
Usually, when I look at a dog's eyes, that seems to be a signal to the dog to spring forth, teeth bared.
I tend not to look a dog in the eye these days.
Click to expand...

Dogs that don't know you don't like being looked straight in the eye, it's seen by them as very threatening, whereas the article in the post above is referring to looking into the eyes of a dog you know.

It's the difference between looking at your lover and at a skinhead in a pub in the Goebbels :)
 
Some years ago I was walking round a part of a zoo that will remain nameless
that was not often visited by the public, all there was there were some wolves
in big outdoor runs, anyway as I decided to head back to the more populer
parts of the zoo a chap was coming the other way, it turned out he was one
of the zoo managers.
He said it's not often anyone comes this way but a few weeks ago one of
the wolves got out so I came looking for it and met some bloke like you
on his own, so not wanting to frighten him I asked "have you seen a dog
knocking about?" bloke obviously in a rush did not stop but shouted back
" dog my arse it's a bloody Wolfe and it's down there", He knew and was
not hanging about to argue the point.
 
A zoo not often visited by the public? How do they still exist?
 
Fluttermoth said:
Dogs that don't know you don't like being looked straight in the eye, it's seen by them as very threatening, whereas the article in the post above is referring to looking into the eyes of a dog you know.
Click to expand...
i pretty much always look unknown dogs in the eye when i come across them and almost always get a friendly response ... dogs never growl or show anything other than friendship to me, at least i cant recall an occasion when that wasnt the case ... we always had a dog when i was growing up but i dont consider myself a dog-person
 
Mythopoeika said:
A zoo not often visited by the public? How do they still exist?
Click to expand...
I put that badly a part of a zoo not often visited by members of the public,
not been to a zoo for a good few years but many had such places.
 
henry said:
i pretty much always look unknown dogs in the eye when i come across them and almost always get a friendly response ... dogs never growl or show anything other than friendship to me, at least i cant recall an occasion when that wasnt the case ... we always had a dog when i was growing up but i dont consider myself a dog-person
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Well, as always when animals are involved (and I'm including people there ;) ), there are multiple subtle factors at play. Your body language, apart from the eye contact, might be more relaxed and confident than Myth's (I suspect this is the case, especially if Myth's had a few bad experiences :( ).

It still holds as a general principle; if you're worried about a dog, you definitely don't want to be trying to stare it down!
 
A review of three books about the journey from wolf to dog.

Raised by Wolves
Tim Flannery
APRIL 5, 2018 ISSUE

The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved
ir

by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg
Yale University Press, 326 pp., $38.00

What It’s Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
ir

by Gregory Berns
Basic Books, 301 pp., $28.00

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
ir

by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut
University of Chicago Press, 216 pp., $26.00

One day around 26,000 years ago, an eight-to-ten-year-old child and a canine walked together into the rear of Chauvet Cave, in what is now France. Judging from their tracks, which can be traced for around 150 feet across the cave floor, their route took them past the magnificent art for which the cave is famous and into the Room of Skulls—a grotto where many cave-bear skulls can still be seen. They walked together companionably and deliberately, the child slipping once or twice, as well as stopping to clean a torch, in the process leaving a smear of charcoal.

It’s nice to imagine that the pair’s Huckleberry Finn–like exploration became the stuff of legend in their clan, for at the time Chauvet Cave’s recesses were abandoned, its art and cave-bear bones were already thousands of years old, and soon thereafter a landslide would seal the cave entrance. Whatever happened, the pair’s adventure certainly became famous in 2016, when a large radiocarbon dating program that included the smear of charcoal discarded by the child confirmed that the tracks constitute the oldest unequivocal evidence of a relationship between humans and canines.*

You might think that fossil bones and ancient DNA would allow scientists to trace our relationship with canines through the transition from wolf to dog, but this is not straightforward. Over thousands of years of domestication, canine DNA has become hopelessly mixed, and even the most complete Ice Age canine skeletons cannot be absolutely identified as wolf or dog. A 36,000-year-old canine skull from Goyet Cave in Belgium illustrates some of the problems confronting researchers. It is the earliest dog-like skull ever found, being relatively small and short-faced, as dogs’ are, but wolves’ generally are not; yet genetic analysis reveals that it is not closely related to any living wolves or dogs. ...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/raised-by-wolves/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR Wolves Orban Cambridge Analytica&utm_content=NYR Wolves Orban Cambridge Analytica+CID_54761ca178aa65ea5c4a4410b9616c02&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Raised by Wolves
 
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It would seem the first dogs to accompany humans into the Americas were of Siberian origin, proliferated across the two continents, but were virtually exterminated during Euro-colonization.

Native Dogs of the Americas Were Wiped Out by European Colonization
Ancient dogs arrived in the Americas alongside humans more than 10,000 years ago, but were later wiped out by European colonization, a new study suggests.

In fact, besides a few genes in some modern dogs today, the only trace of the original American dogs in today's canines is found in the form of a common canine tumor, according to the study, published today (July 5) in the journal Science.

The evolutionary history of dogs has always been a bit murky, as today's dogs are like a "soupy mix" of genes from various breeds, said co-lead study author Angela Perri, a research fellow at Durham University in England. But by looking at genes from more than 71 archaeological dog remains in North America and Siberia and comparing them with modern dog genes, the team was able to trace their elusive steps. ...

The new study dispelled a previous theory about the origin of dogs in the Americas, which posited that they evolved from domesticated wolves. The findings "put a nail in the coffin really for [that] idea,"Perri told Live Science. In the new data, "we just had absolutely no evidence of that."

In the study, the researchers took DNA samples from dog remains that spanned time (throughout thousands of years) and space (North America and Siberia). Their findings suggested a Eurasian origin, and more specifically, a Siberian one. Namely, that the first dogs came to the Americas more than 10,000 years ago, across the Bering land bridge, or Beringia, that connected North America and Asia. Afterward, the dogs dispersed across the Americas where they lived for 9,000 years, isolated from the world.

But those dogs aren't the dogs you'll pet today. Rather, contemporary breeds likely stem from three more instances of dogs being brought to the Americas in the last 1,000 years, according to the study. Those include arctic dogs brought by the Thule people about 1,000 years ago that are the ancestors of dogs such as malamutes, huskies and Greenland sled dogs; dogs brought by Europeans starting in the 15th century; and Siberian huskies brought to the American Arctic during the Alaskan gold rush. ...
Click to expand...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/62996-native-american-dogs-europeans.html

CITED ARTICLE in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ved-people-thousands-years-then-they-vanished
 
A tale of wolves who helped farmers who were a relict population of Ice Age wolves. (The wolves were the relict population but I don't rule out the possibility of the farmers being werewolves.)

JENA, GERMANY—On the island of Honshū in Japan, farmers long appreciated a small gray wolf as a guardian of their crops because its howls warned them of raiders such as wild boars. In folklore, “the Honshū wolf” was seen as a spirit of the forest and honored with shrines. But when the wolves got rabies from dogs in the 19th century, farmers shot and poisoned them until the last wolf died in 1905.

Now, only a few stuffed Honshū wolves, like the one shown above, exist in museums. But they were indeed representatives of a wilder era, as graduate student Jonas Niemann of the University of Copenhagen found to his surprise. When he and his colleagues analyzed the genome of a Honshū wolf skeleton from the Natural History Museum in London, they found that this wolf appeared to be a relic of an ancient group of wolves that ranged across the Northern Hemisphere until 20,000 years ago.

The wolf’s DNA more closely resembled that of a long-extinct wolf that lived in Siberia more than 35,000 years ago than that of living Eurasian and American wolves, ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ly_2018-09-25&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2391561
 
Fluttermoth said:
Well, as always when animals are involved (and I'm including people there ;) ), there are multiple subtle factors at play. Your body language, apart from the eye contact, might be more relaxed and confident than Myth's (I suspect this is the case, especially if Myth's had a few bad experiences :( ).

It still holds as a general principle; if you're worried about a dog, you definitely don't want to be trying to stare it down!
Click to expand...


This, there's a difference to the stare, there's a hard stare and soft stare and the difference isn't always obvious. Smiling while looking into their eyes softens your face up and is less likely to be taken as a challenge (I find anyway) but Fluttermoth's general principle is a good one
 
Petroglyphs discovered in Saudi Arabia depict hunters with a pack of hounds, some of them on leashes. These amazing images from an unknown civilisation push the domestication of man's best friend back several thousand years. Also, the proximity to the enigmatic structures known as "gates" and similarly dated to at least 9,000 years ago, show that Göbekli Tepe wasn't the only flourishing and coordinated culture on the cusp between the palaeolithic and mesolithic eras.

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blog...k-art-from-saudi.html?m=1#tUUYdOQmc2DWaLsE.97

and the "gates" :

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....ence/saudi-arabia-gates-google-earth.amp.html
 
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How long before these wolves are domesticated and become military pets?

Wolves are an impressive success story for wildlife recovery in central Europe, bouncing back from near extermination in the 20th century to a population of several thousand today. And in Germany, where populations have been growing by 36% per year, military bases have played a surprisingly central role in helping the animals reclaim habitat, a new analysis finds.

"What is really remarkable is that the military areas acted as a stepping stone for the recolonization" – and were far more important than civilian protected areas in the early stages of recovery, says Guillaume Chapron, a wildlife ecologist at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, who was not involved in the research. "It shows that when you strictly protect wildlife, it comes back."

Across much of Europe, wolves were heavily persecuted for attacking livestock. They were wiped out in Germany during the 19th century. But in the 1980s and 1990s, new European laws protected wildlife and habitat, setting the stage for their recovery. And in Eastern and southern Europe abandoned farmland meant fewer people and more deer for wolves to hunt. In the late 1990s, wolves began to dart into Germany from the forests of Poland. The first litter of pups in Germany was reported in 2001 in Saxony-Brandenburg. They’ve since spread westward into six more of Germany's 16 federal states, and monitoring data shows their numbers are rising. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ly_2019-02-18&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2673656
 
Skrymr said:
This, there's a difference to the stare, there's a hard stare and soft stare and the difference isn't always obvious. Smiling while looking into their eyes softens your face up and is less likely to be taken as a challenge (I find anyway) but Fluttermoth's general principle is a good one
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What I was taught as a meter reader applies:
Stand 45 degrees on
Take off a cap because it can look like forward flattened, hence aggressive ears position
Confident but higher pitched voice; male voices, in particular, can sound like growling
Use don't look directly but do not drop your head
Otherwise use peripheral vision to observe (also reacts faster to movement)
Never put your hand toward an animal, instead let it sniff your hand alongside your leg
Avoid hi-vis clothing (when not working)
 
The wolves are back in the Netherlands.

Male and female wolves have been spotted in a national park in the Netherlands, raising hopes - and fears - of a settled wolf population for the first time since the 19th century.

Research by ecologist Hugh Jansman confirmed the presence of at least one female in De Hoge Veluwe park in the east of the country, as well as the strong likelihood of a male, according to the NPO 1 public broadcaster.

The first wolf in over a century arrived from Eastern Europe via Germany in 2015, and numbers have increased at a pace.

Four were reported between November 2018 and January 2019, before Gelderland Province commissioned Mr Jansman of Wageningen University to estimate wolf numbers using footprints, droppings and deer carcasses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-47866510
 
Skrymr said:
This, there's a difference to the stare, there's a hard stare and soft stare and the difference isn't always obvious. Smiling while looking into their eyes softens your face up and is less likely to be taken as a challenge (I find anyway) but Fluttermoth's general principle is a good one
Click to expand...

Dogs have lived with humans for so long that they instinctively know to look at the right side of a human’s face first, as this is the side that most clearly expresses a person’s emotional state.

maximus otter
 
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